Take a look around Metacritic, for a start, and you’ll see what I mean. With an average around 66/100, the game is often flagged for its name. “Don’t call this XCOM,” the IGN review proclaims. That would have been good advice.

In fact, there’s probably an uncomfortable amount of blame to be laid at the feet of the name “XCOM” and all the baggage it entails. After all, XCOM is a storied series and comes with all kinds of connotations, about gameplay, genre, and elements that define it. An XCOM game needs to be a strategy title, or at least include a strategy component. It should have base-building. It should feel tactical as well as permanent, with high stakes behind every mission.

The Bureau struggles with all those elements, although it also often executes on them better than it gets credit for doing. Many reviews decried it as trying to be “all things to all players,” but I think that’s an assessment that comes from the name. The Bureau isn’t all that far removed from titles like Mass Effect or the Brothers in Arms series when it comes to gameplay — so why is this strategy/shooter hybrid “all things to all players” and those aren’t?

It’s that damned XCOM label, and all requirements that come with it. The unfortunate result of that branding is that a game that does Mass Effect’s combat better than Mass Effect enjoys middling review scores, and will likely never have much more than a cult fanbase.

That’s not to say The Bureau isn’t without flaws, because it definitely has a few — but many of things cited as being negatives really ought to be counted in the game’s favor. Reviews point to issues such as AI teammates who need “babysitting,” and tactical gameplay that requires players to put in a lot of time in its slow-motion, order-giving interface. And yes, certainly there are elements of this that are dumb, like the requirement to physically move a cursor into a position — moving it up and down stairs and around barricades — to issue orders to characters.

But other flaws aren’t flaws at all — they’re features. AI teammates in The Bureau aren’t meant to be Mass Effect’s semi-autonomous squad, but rather, a tactical extension of the player, and complaining about their inability to get themselves out of trouble seems to be missing the point. A similar approach is taken in Brothers in Arms, in which players wield a gun of their own, but must constantly issue orders to squad members to move their positions and assign them enemies to attack.

That’s a conscious choice to infuse the third-person shooter style of The Bureau with XCOM-esque strategy. Instead of being a commander from a remote position, however, you’re a battlefield lieutenant, working with your men in the thick of battle. Those AI guys rely on you to be the smart one.

UPDATE: Game Front reached out to 2K Games about the layoffs, and we received the same “staff reductions” response sent to Polygon:

“We can confirm staff reductions at 2K Marin. While these were difficult decisions, we regularly evaluate our development efforts and have decided to reallocate creative resources. Our goal to create world-class video game titles remains unchanged.”

The 2K representative would not comment on the rumor that 2K Marin would be closing outright due to the layoffs.

The initial source says the majority of the team is being let go, while a second source claims 2K Marin is closed.

The move comes weeks after 2K Games confirmed it would be opening a new Bay Area studio with former Epic Games and Irrational Games exec Rod Fergusson. Some 2K Marin employees are making the move over to the yet-to-be-named studio, but it sounds like the majority of the Marin staff is no longer employed by 2K Games.

2K’s comment to Polygon:

“We can confirm staff reductions at 2K Marin. While these were difficult decisions, we regularly evaluate our development efforts and have decided to reallocate creative resources. Our goal to create world-class video game titles remains unchanged.”

Game Front has also reached out to 2K Games for comment, and we will update as soon as more news comes in.

Storytime is a recurring series in which we analyze the storytelling found in video games by looking at the elements that form those stories, the messages they deliver, and the people who create them.

I’m starting to wonder: Has there ever been a game that did “pick one of three endings” well?

At least in the last few years, no game has really done a good job with this seemingly undying trope. You know the one — when you finally arrive at the end of a game (usually one with some moral agonizing along the way) and are presented with three choices about what to do with all the power you’ve accrued; it’s best known in games such as Mass Effect and Deus Ex.

Despite being awesome in many other ways, Deus Ex: Human Revolution delivered three endings in an 11th-hour choice that felt functionally identical. Mass Effect 3 famously botched its endings even worse — they were identical, and it took much player protest for BioWare to add a few extra cutscenes and voice overs to make the choice have any real meaning at all.

But if there’s a game in recent memory that has at least taken a step in the right direction when it comes to dolling out three endings based on a final choice, it’s The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. That’s not because the game’s endings are especially amazing or even very diverse (they aren’t). But the choice of how you wind up with any one ending, at least, is a novel one in 2K Marin’s criminally underappreciated title.

Hold on, we’re about to get into Spoiler Territory.

For those unfamiliar, Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution — our two go-to examples — come down to a final moment in which a seemingly benevolent AI basically lays out three switches in front of the player. Each of these switches aligns with a different moral attitude. Mass Effect 3’s endings let you: wipe out the apocalyptic Reaper threat, but the consequence is genocide; take control the Reapers, at the cost of Commander Shepard’s humanity; or take a third, more harmonious option, which is clearly intended to be the best choice (it requires using up Shepard still, though).

DXHR goes a similar route. In its final moments, you can choose what story the public at large learns about the events of the game. One story will cause humanity to reject the game’s rampant transhumanism; one story causes them to embrace it. The final option lets you leave humanity to its own devices by choosing not to interfere.

In both cases (and with many other games that use this brand of “choice” for how a game’s events play out in the end), the final decision as to which ending the player lays onto his or her story comes at the culmination of the game, down to a single choice. Often, these kinds of choices ring a bit false. In the case of Mass Effect, for example, being pigeon-holed into picking one of three booby trapped Reaper off-switches seemed extremely limiting. In DXHR, the choices all sort of suck in the short-term as well. After all you’ve done, what really happens, in both games, depends on which button you slap in the last seconds. It all feels rather thin.

The Bureau is a slightly different case, however. Yes, all three of its endings align with similar moralities: a “kill ‘em all” attitude taken toward the invading aliens, an attitude that leans toward enslavement of the enemies for the benefit of humanity, and a much cheerier diplomatic solution.

The difference is, you don’t really know you’re choosing the ending when you choose it.

Last week, Game Front headed up to sunny Novato, CA, to the headquarters of 2K Marin, located — appropriately for XCOM — in an old military base. In addition to extensive hands-on time with the game — see our preview coverage here — we had the chance to interview the game’s Creative Director, Morgan Gray. Gray’s thinning hair, long sideburns and tasteful piercings make him look like the bassist in an underrated 90′s rock band, but he’s a 17-year industry veteran, and he spoke eloquently and passionately about The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The interview follows below (transcript has been edited for clarity and ease of reading).

Game Front: The first thing I’m curious about is the long design process. The transition from the game I saw in 2011 — how that happened, why that happened.

Morgan Gray: The irony is, it’s not even that long of a process, because most games take 3-5 years to make. What we did wrong is that we showed too early. When we first showed in 2010, we had something that was first-person, it was survival horror, it was about investigation gameplay, it was kind of spooky, kind of tense. We thought it was cool — it was unique, and it was eerie, but it wasn’t hitting the goal of being a new expression of XCOM gameplay. It could have been any creepy alien game, or a creepy 50s game.

GF: Was that a step in a process that you were too early on, or did you have to change directions and go down a different branch?

MG: We were exploring different stabs we could do for going from turn-based isometric to some other expression. We showed a stab a little early. If you compare it to movies and stuff, with different script treatments, it could go this way or it could go that way. With shows, they do not air the pilot episode that you see, but they do the “work-ups.” We just unfortunately jumped the gun.

After 2010, we spent the next year refining the vision for the game we put forward in 2011, which is pretty much, by-and-large the same game which we have now, with the exception that we moved away from the first-person view perspective for Carter — at the time in 2011, it was first-person Carter, third-person tactical control of the squad –- to just going all third-person. For two reasons: one, we spent so much time in tactical combat that we figured if you’re going to be in third-person for that, the advantages it gives you, the situational awareness — you can see yourself in relationship to your team, to the enemies, to the terrain — [is important]. It also helped us to boost the narrative of character. If you’re telling a viewpoint story for a viewpoint character, him being disembodied hands wasn’t the same as being able to see his interactions with the other characters.

GF: That change in tack — was it a combination of feedback from people you showed the game to, and yourselves saying “this isn’t getting the reaction that we wanted?”

MG: The thing is, always, a dev team is a large group of people. Many of us are classic XCOM fans. XCOM came into my life in ’94 as a PC Gamer demo disc, and hasn’t left any of my systems since then. There’s a combination of the team’s own introspection — “is this hitting the mark the way we like it” — the answer was “no.” A lot of the team’s sentiments overlapped stuff that was happening in the forums. That being said, it was a mixed bag. There are still people today who say “that game you showed in 2010 – I liked that! Where did that game go?”

It wasn’t hitting where we wanted it to hit. The big thing for us as a team was “this isn’t hitting the XCOM hard enough. This could be branded anything.” Our goal — what was handed us as our charter was “find a new expression of XCOM.”

It’s an aliens and fedoras kind of weekend at Game Front, starting with our hands-on preview of The Bureau: XCOM declassified. A visit to 2K Marin also yielded an extensive interview with The Bureau creative director Morgan Gray, who had a clever answer for critics who think last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown was all the franchise needed to move forward:

Game Front: I have to put on my devil’s advocate hat, or my everyman skeptic hat. How would you respond to someone like that who says “there’s already a new XCOM game — Firaxis took this classic game and just updated in all these great ways. Why do I need to pay $60 for another one?”

Morgan Gray: Cool. Don’t! If you feel totally satisfied with your XCOM experience, you don’t want to try different expressions, you’re totally like, “this is all I ever need in my life” — right on. I get that. It’s cool. There’re guys like that – there are also guys who are like “I don’t play turn-based games because they’re boring as all hell.

Those guys are wrong, because turn-based games are amazing. I think the skeptical XCOM fan, that is thinking in some way that we’re trying to usurp or replace a thing — that is not our goal, our goal is to enhance and supplement.

That’s why I like the spin-off series – you can have Dr. Who, you can have Torchwood. Torchwood isn’t going to make Dr. Who go away. It’s giving you more Dr. Who in a different slant. And that’s kind of our goal. We want to give you that action slant, we want to give you that real-time aspect of it. We want to give you the narrative, give you the story. If those things aren’t interesting to you, and you’re an XCOM fan, then by all means, please, make yourself happy.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified begins, like all XCOM games, with a surprise attack. Aliens strike deep at the heart of the American military machine, at a secret base somewhere in the vast Western wilderness.

Agent William Carter wakes up to it with a hangover. A crack operative, he has trauma in his past: a wife and child dead in a house fire that happened while he was out on assignment.

Initially, there’s no time for angst. Not content with pulverizing outmatched military hardware — The Bureau is set in 1962, with a backdrop of Cold War paranoia and political turmoil — the alien enemy is possessing people, including Carter’s colleagues. The doughty agent and his beautifully rendered face — expressive, human, like something off an old pulp novel — has to escape the base alive.

“Collapsing high-tech scientific/military base” isn’t the most original setting for a game’s first moments, but the level designers at 2K Marin do themselves proud, layering in flickering shadows, retro-futuristic technology, and burning tanks and the smoky haze they produce.

Carter is soon joined by two fellow G-men, and the game introduces its distinctive brand of third-person tactical combat. Players will appreciate the clatter of 60′s firearms, the vintage-looking UI, which recalls BioShock, and the campy, film-reel tutorials, which recall Fallout.

More involved than Mass Effect, The Bureau will require careful planning to take down alien threats — moving allies into cover and deploying special abilities like headshots, taunts, squad buffs, and even artillery strikes. It’s a system designed to challenge your brain in the same way the top-down, isometric XCOM games did.

After events that will remain un-spoiled, Carter ends up back at XCOM headquarters, an underground lair originally designed to serve as a base of resistance in the event of Soviet invasion. There’s a lot of running around and talking to people — the avuncular XCOM director, the affable partner, the creepy German mad-scientist type, the fiery female agent beset by 60′s sexism. There’s also plenty of background information to be gleaned from reading notes and audio recordings left lying around in accordance with current game design convention.

This section oozes 60′s atmosphere, but feels a little inert; one hopes that the on-base excitement will pick up when the initial “here’s where everything is” housekeeping is out of the way. It also serves as a reminder that despite the best efforts of talented animators, video game characters still look silly smoking cigarettes.

Things pick up once Carter is back out on a mission, picking through the remains of a college’s small-town homecoming while attempting to find an eccentric professor whose knowledge may hold the key to defeating the aliens. Those who have followed the Bureau for some time will recognize this level from earlier previews of the game.

This first plot mission provides plenty of crisp 60′s art direction, as well as the first glimpse of the creepy zombified townsfolk the aliens have corrupted and left behind for some uncertain purpose. It’s also the first taste of true combat, without tutorial-buffed allies. On its recommended difficulty, The Bureau is a real challenge, and makes good on the promise of true XCOM-style brain-engagement. You’ll want to be constantly issuing orders to your squad, moving them into solid cover and deploying special abilities.

While there are plenty of teaser videos floating around for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, nothing beats a hands-on preview. Mitch got his hands on a copy of the upcoming retro-future addition to the XCOM franchise, and it appears to be a faithful translation of XCOM into a tactical shooter. Watch as Mitch makes his way through alien soldiers and drones with all the best agents the 1960s has to offer.

Worried about this change to the XCOM formula? Excited for more alien slaying? Let us know below!